This Cincinnatian's device could make it easier to type on the go

If a device allowed you to type on your smartphone or tablet as fast as you could on your keyboard while walking, no less, would you use it?

That’s the hope of Mark Parker, president and founder of Blue Ash-based TREWGrip.

TREWGrip is a curved keyboard that mounts to a phone or tablet, but the trick is the keys are on the back. Imagine a keyboard split in half, flipped upside down and then reconnected with the top rows of keys facing each other so a user gripping the sides with each hand has their fingers positioned above the same keys.

Parker hopes to launch the product during a typing competition occurring in two weeks at the Museum Center at Union Terminal.

“It’s a mobile world now,” Parker told me. “People use technology while they’re walking. They can’t be restricted to a flat keyboard that they have to sit on their desk or on their lap.”

Parker, who owns Outlier Technologies, conceived the idea after receiving feedback for another product of his, SansWrite, which allows inspectors to write reports through a variety of drop-down menus, allowing them to file from the field without having to type. The inspectors said that sometimes they needed to get more detailed than selecting from a menu.

Parker said he toyed with voice input and handwriting recognition, but the inspectors always went back to typing with their keyboards or pecking letters with their fingers on a mobile screen.

“I was sitting at home one night and picked up my hands off the keyboard and thought, what if we just rotate the hands?” he said. “We keep the basics of the QWERTY keyboard, but rotate it so you can hold it easily while walking.”

If typing on keys you can’t see on the rear of a device sounds peculiar, it is. Microsoft did a study of rear typing in 2010 and found only one in 12 participants was proficient in it within an hour of being given a device. The rest could only type at about 15 words per minute, about the same as typing on a touch screen.

Parker says that people who keep at it — he recommends between five and 10 hours of practice — can start typing at closer to a normal rate of between 50 and 70 words per minute.

He went through two prototypes, the most recent of which will be debuted at the typing competition.

The competition, the first round of which occurs on July 20, is open to the public and will see who can type fastest on either a keyboard or typewriter. The top eight fastest typers will be given a TREWGrip prototype and five days to practice.

The finals will be held on July 25, exactly 125 years after Frank McGurrin beat Louis Traub in a typing competition in Cincinnati that some say led to the popularization of the QWERTY keyboard, and the fastest TREWGrip user will be awarded $2,500. If the winner beats McGurrin’s record of 98 words per minute, the prize will double to $5,000.

TREWGrip has been self-funded through Outlier Technologies thus far, but after the typing competition Parker hopes to launch a Kickstarter crowd-funding campaign to raise $100,000 to begin production.